I haven’t blogged in quite awhile (my site says two weeks!) so I figured I’d check in. It’s been for a good reason – I’ve been busy lately! I’ve got two new projects on the go that I’m quite excited about, I figured I’d give everyone a quick preview here.

I’m not sure what it is about board games, but ever since I got into the hobby about 3 years ago I haven’t looked back. There’s a fun, social aspect that you just can’t get from other types of gaming, and board games make even the most introverted people get involved and have fun! I’ve featured my favourite lunch time (< 1 hour) games before, so I thought I’d highlight a few of the longer games I really enjoy.

.NET has a pretty sweet framework, the Task Parallel Library, which you can use to start “tasks” that may or may not take advantage of your computer’s multiple cores while executing asynchronously. It is pretty easy to use out of the box, but also provides quite a few options for fine grained control – the task continuation options are one of those options.

Amid all the debate on how to get more women and students into technology, I took a second to reflect on what got me started. Perhaps there are some notes that can be taken from my story and other’s stories on how they got started into development that can lead to clues on how to get others involved?

Among all the code, all the frameworks and SDKs, all the programming patterns, all the agile project management that I’ve learned over the years, I think one of the most valuable skills I’ve learned in my career as a professional developer is the ability to say No.

Playing around a bit last night with Azure I went to their portal.azure.com website. At first it seemed like a fancy front-end web app for their normal manage.windowsazure.com site, but upon investigation it’s so much more!

You can’t imagine how excited I am for this! As someone who’s entire UI is written in asynchronous JavaScript, debugging and tracing bugs and other issues can be a huge pain in the neck – not anymore with Chrome dev tools!